Since the last Niagara Economic Summit last October, organized by Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce, I have been pondering some of the central themes addressed at that conference.

Namely, overcoming barriers and exploiting opportunities to economic success, improving the region’s infrastructure and public transit, and enhancing the prospects of emerging industries and trends in the region.

A lot of smart observations were made by brilliant minds from the academic, business, political and community grassroots sectors in each of the three respective panels. However, one central fact emerged — and sadly, it was not a new fact.

It has been the bane of our collective existence and the lamentation of countless conferences in Niagara.

Governance.

What one needs to recognize is that governance is largely about institutions. Making institutions work for a region, rather than imprisoning a region within the cage of its own rules and procedures.

For instance, if an environment is to be created that is conducive to the emergence, nurturing and flourishing of ideas and innovation, knowledge-sharing and entrepreneurialism, a region — any region — must align its institutions to do just that.

Now, it is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Institutions are not just about structures like, say, a two-tier system of governance. They also include the culture, values and habits of those individuals who operate within those structures.

In fact, the mindset and attitudes of the leadership is far more important than any structure one can come up with. And again, leadership in this sense is not simply about formal positions like mayors, councillors, CAOs and the like. It is a much broader concept that includes actors drawn from across various sectors, including non-governmental grassroots activists.

Developing a culture of bringing minds together to problem-solve on specific and concrete issues and institutionalizing those practices within well-established and recurring platforms is the essence of strategic leadership that most successful regions around the world share.

In such an environment, economic strategies stand a better chance of being more than mere blueprints on paper.

The success of economic reinvention in Niagara is not a mystery to be unravelled by some expensive consultant flown from distant places to tell us something we do not already know. It is not about revising the region’s economic strategy every three or five years.

It is about bringing together and leveraging the existing social or civic capital into strong, collaborative leadership and engagement that is laser-focused on a set of concrete problems and coming up with time-specific and measurable commitments of resources to address those problems.

If you roll your eyes at the word collaboration, consider yourself forgiven. You have heard it many times before.

Well, get used to hearing it, because there is no other magic pill or silver bullet out there to make a region succeed.

To claim there is a specific strategy that can make Niagara create this number of jobs or attract that number of firms over the next five or 50 years is often daydreaming at best and sheer dishonesty at worst.

The post-industrial economy of the 21st century is notoriously fluid and unpredictable. The whole world is in economic topsy-turvy. Ask the Europeans.

Economic development is simply the aggregate manifestation of concrete collaborative actions sector by sector, issue by issue, one day at a time. Together, these small efforts add up to create the conditions for economic reinvention and development.

An institution of strong civic leadership embedded within a culture of collaboration and sustained by platforms of concrete problem-solving and strategic investment is the next frontier of economic governance for Niagara.

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Charles Conteh is an associate professor of public policy and management in the department of political science at Brock University. His research interest is to understand how cities and regions are adapting to global economic changes. He can be reached at cconteh@brocku.ca.